What marketers need to know about robotic process automation

What

Freeing their employees from boring, repetitive and low-skilled tasks is the dream of many marketers. Because despite the supplier’s commitment to seamless integration and data flow, manual data processing is an inevitable result when implementing new digital tools and processes.

However, these results are not limited to marketing, there are similar stories in finance, IT, human resources, and other important business functions.

It was the pain felt by professionals with these functions that first led to the emergence of a set of tools that came to be known as Robotic Process Automation, or RPA (not to be confused with the reality show related to the Royal Prince) Alfred Hospital ).

Forrester principal analyst Leslie Joseph describes RPA at its most basic level as the ability to use software robots to understand user interface elements on websites and applications, string these elements into a workflow, and effectively imitate the behavior of human operators . Therefore, RPA robots are often referred to as digital workers.

“For RPA, the typical low-hanging fruit is any type of repetitive task that humans must complete,” Joseph said Chief Marketing Officer“Things like moving data from “location a” to “location b” or creating a case from a Salesforce ticket. In this sense, it is a very versatile tool because it is UI-centric Screen capture.”

This versatility means that RPA can be used in a large number of applications. Joseph said that the most effective and obvious starting point is the back-end financial or procurement process, where the application set itself is a legacy.

“From a CFO’s point of view, it makes sense for’digital workers’ to enter and access these types of workflows, otherwise they will have to modernize the system, which will separate capital expenditure from other things they need to do Take it away urgently,” he said.

However, although RPA-based digital workers may now be common in financial and IT workflows, Joseph said that so far, they have had very little application in marketing, mainly because most modern marketing platforms contain powerful The integrated function of API, thereby minimizing the demand process based on RPA. However, several recent announcements indicate an increase in the use of RPA in marketing.

RPA and marketing use cases

In August, Salesforce announced that it had acquired Servicetrace, a German RPA company, to integrate the existing API-based integration capabilities it acquired when it acquired MuleSoft in 2018. In the same month, another provider, MoEngage, raised US$32.5 million to help develop RPA technology to optimize customer engagement.

These events are just the latest in a series of financing, mergers and acquisitions by RPA providers, including multiple acquisitions by Microsoft, SAP, IBM and ServiceNow, as well as the public listing of RPA expert UiPath. The value of the latter has now risen to more than 35 billion U.S. dollars.

With so much money, it is only a matter of time before marketers’ problems start to interest RPA providers, especially those related to the data flow in customer engagement.

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